Portsmouth Water gets its new HQ access approved, at the expense of the safety and wellbeing of users of the Bosmere GP Practice and the co-located Pharmacy.
A report on last night’s planning committee decision and a wake-up call to Havant’s elected representatives, before the nightmare in the headline really starts to bite.
The original draft of this post clearly touched a few nerves – and the dystopian tone of the opening headline likely still does. To those who found it unsettling, I offer my apologies; I’ve since made some considered adjustments to the wording.
#ProtectTheNHS
I’ve seen a few shocking planning committee meetings in recent years and last night’s meeting to decide Portsmouth Water’s new headquarters planning application was right up there with the ones that had dumped the largest new Amazon delivery station in the country on the wrong side of the tracks, right in the heart of Havant. The result in both cases, had always seemed inevitable – some might even say, pre-determined.
The lessons learned from these two serious lapses in local authority planning process are deeply concerning and will be detailed in a post dedicated to the subject within a few days. Any resident concerned about Havant Borough Council’s relationship with Bloor Homes at the Berewood Development and Southleigh Strategic sites should take note of them.
Bedhampton’s Liberal councillors performed with as much respect for the residents of their ward as the St Faith’s Labour representatives did at Tuesday evening’s shambolic Southleigh Link Road public meeting. The message to the sole remaining Conservative councillor across the Bedhampton, St Faith’s and Emsworth wards is this. The Bosmere Medical Centre was moved from St Faith’s ward into Bedhampton ward by last year’s boundary changes, so like your two Liberal peers, you had a golden opportunity as a Bedhampton ward councillor to take the full ten minutes allotted to you as a ward councillor to speak on behalf of your residents’ concerns about this application.
The Deputy Leader of the Council sadly wasted her opportunity to present either her residents’ concerns or those of the medical centre in her ward, rambling at the at the speaking table after consulting what appeared to be last minute emailed guidance on her laptop, as you can see below. With no copy of her deputation included with the committee papers, it is still unclear whether Cllr. Gray was speaking in support or speaking against the application.
The medical centre and the pharmacy had put their faith in me to take the full five minutes available to us under the ‘democratic’ services rules to make some valid points. If two of us had wanted to speak, we’d have had 2.5 minutes each, if five of us, we would theoretically have had one minute each. In any event, the NHS providers had far more pressing duties to perform under their NHS Contracts, which is why the Bosmere Patient Participation Group had taken the lead on this since the Development Consultation Forum way back in 2019.
Please take the time to read all seven deputations by clicking the image below – the relevant extract from the Committee papers will open in a separate browser tab.
Take the time to read through those deputations before you watch the video below.
There are seven written statements in all, starting with the ever-annoying Mr Comlay, followed by the Senior Partner at the GP surgery, the PPG (Patient Participation Group) Chairman, the Pharmacy owner, Bob Taylor, CEO of Portsmouth Water and his planning consultant, a former HBC Planning Services officer, Dr Chris Lyons.
The doctor (of ‘town and country planning’ rather than ‘medicine’, for those who wonder) who had brought along Mr Taylor and a previously unannounced transport consultant to answer the questions that needed something more substantial than the usual planning consultancy bullshit. (He needn’t have been worried since none were asked, other than by Emsworth’s Councillor Robert to the medical centre representative (!), rather than to the surprise guest transport consultant or the conveniently absent Hampshire County Council Highways planner, suggesting that the Greens are also now struggling to engage with real local issues.)
Note: If you find yourself wondering why the references to TRICS keep coming up, read this earlier HCS post.)
The embedded link below will start the video at the deputations. If you want to suffer the full two hours, simply move the slider back to the beginning.
When you’ve reached the point of giving up on that one, stop the video and skip back to this point, where Councillor Lind speaks on behalf of himself and the Deputy Leader, presumably in recognition of her apparent difficulty in speaking coherently on her own. Bedhampton residents deserve better.
Questions arising from the meeting – a starter set
It’s hard knowing quite where to begin, the list simply grew longer as the meeting dragged on.
It seems curious that Councillor Lind had been selected to sit on this committee, given the fact that his allotment-digging partner, the Deputy Leader, was making an unannounced deputation in support of the officer’s recommendation. From memory, Councillor Gray’s previous appearance at the Planning Committee was to speak in favour of the officer’s recommendation for the equally controversial Portsmouth Water ‘Dual Pipeline’ planning application. On both occasions, she appeared to have been acting on instructions from above.
The pattern of potential conflicts of interest mirrors that associated with the Amazon debacle, while the catalogue of unexplained procedural shortcomings continues to expand.
Here is just a small sample:
| How come the Deputy Leader’s ten minute deputation as a ward councillor had not been included with the Committee papers, reinforcing the appearance that she was making it up as she went along? |
| How could Mr. Weaver – the fifth caretaker head of Planning Services since in the past three years – spring a surprise response to the first deputation, received on the very morning of the meeting from Hampshire County Council Highways planning officer and, once again, not published ahead of the meeting? Roll back to this point in the meeting and listen carefully. |
| Why had the Hampshire County Council highways officer not been three line whipped into attendance, to explain their own belated response to the questions raised on behalf of the medical centre over a year ago? (You can read them in this post from 2024) |
| To Councillor Brown, the Chairman of the Committee, at what point in the planning decision timeline do you draw a line under the paperwork and make the call that input to the committee is too late to be admissible? The public are unable to register a request to address the meeting without first submitting a written statement. Is that one rule for the public and another for the Deputy Leader? Sorry – that was actually two questions. |
| Again, for Councillor Brown, if late input is admitted, then should not the meeting be adjourned until all parties have been given sufficient time to review the material, particularly when it’s used by the officers to drive the decision? |
| Once again, Councillor Brown, can you please explain the democratic logic behind the words you used before the vote, taken here from the HCS transcript of the meeting: “The recommendation of a report submitted to a meeting is deemed to be moved and seconded and the motion shall operate as a motion and can be debated without the need for members of the committee having to move and second the recommendation. If members wish to amend this motion, for example by adding a condition or reason for refusal, you may do so provided that the amendment is proposed and seconded and agreed by formal vote. If members are minded to go against the officer’s recommendation, you may vote against the original motion. When the original motion is lost, you will be able to propose and second a fresh motion and vote on it, however planning reasons must be given to justify this motion” . Try as I may, the more I read it, the less sense it makes. Unless it be a deliberate ploy to prevent the committee ever going against the officer’s recommendation? |
| There are, of course, also questions of external influence. For example, when Mr. Taylor said to the Committee members present “…the existing office really is crumbling. Those of you that had a walk around the other day would probably have seen that very obviously, we really do need something new and I’ve been promising it to my staff for quite a long time. I really hope that we can make some progress this evening and, on top of the fact that we will hopefully get a new office then it will release all of that space for much needed residential development as well, so that’s another plus point”. Surely that wasn’t part of the Planning Committee Site Viewing party visit last week? |
| And then there’s the question of the last minute external pressure, tied up with the recent appearance of both the ‘Dual Pipeline’ and the ‘New HQ’ planning applications on the Planning Committee agenda. |
| I’ll stop there, with the deputation noting my “concerns about due process, transparency, and the propriety of addressing objections through informal channels” . |
You may now wish to draw your own conclusion regarding the headline of the Society’s previous post on the matter – ‘Who really runs Havant Borough Council?’
My personal advice to all Havant councillors who care about the future of the borough is this: Look seriously at taking a leaf out of Council Elizabeth Lloyd’s, and more recently Councillor Paul Gray’s, book, resign your whip and stand as an independent before forming a Havant Independent Alliance strong enough to develop a strategy for the borough.
My personal advice to the HBC execs? Give serious consideration to the need to address the procedural issues with your implementation of the local planning system before you inflict any further costly damage to your council tax payers.
Bob Comlay – 27 June 2025
Revised with minor edits to text – 1 July 2025
Havant Civic Society 
This is well below the normal impeccable standard of Havant Civic Society posts!
It’s pretty hypocritical to criticise councillors and officers for not following process at the same time as criticising them for FOLLOWING process, which you can be sure that an appeal lawyer would exploit ruthlessly.
This was a really difficult decision, but providing housing and replacing an old, leaky, climate impacting building with a new, efficient, solar powered one is the right way to go. And I think we know how a refusal would go – they’d win on appeal, at huge legal cost to the Council.
The surgery and pharmacy clearly don’t have enough parking or turning space, and yet there’s always space across the road at M&S and Screwfix car parks. Most patients could walk that far – it just needs an agreement they won’t get tickets, especially during the construction phase – that’s what you should be campaigning for.
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I accept I may have been in a grumpier mood than usual, but did make that disclaimer Wilf!
To address your points in turn, this proposal has been in development for over a decade – a period in which planning policy and public priorities have evolved. More sustainable alternatives may now exist, such as the reuse of brownfield sites. Indeed, the Civic Plaza itself could serve the same purpose, should it become surplus under the future unitary authority – offering Portsmouth Water a more sustainable site and the Council an even greater housing yield. Bob Taylor did acknowledge this point raised by Chris Lloyd himself while we were waiting for a meeting with the Leader back in April.
As I wrote in my deputation, as far as a possible challenge goes, I’d refer you to the comment in my deputation. “This decision carries significant implications for NHS patients across the borough. Overturning the officer’s recommendation could prompt an appeal from the applicant. But accepting it may expose the process to Judicial Review – most likely by one or more of the 20,000 affected patients, on grounds of procedural impropriety. After six years of detailed scrutiny, I believe the evidence supports such a challenge – though I recognise that judgement rests with you.”
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